Album Review: Olias – Fed to the Sky

The meditative, atmospheric music of Olias is made by Wes Grist, who was one third of the much-mourned oddball trio Hello Babies.

He really shows his breadth in this project, serving up long synth instrumentals that seem to tell interesting stories, like the erratic pulses that bubble up from very long tones in “It’s Watching You Back,” calling to mind Morse Code on a telegraph wire (amazingly, still the quintessential sound of a desperate attempt to communicate), or the nature sounds on “Ulterior” that become progressively buried under thickening layers of industrial and eventually military technology, suggesting a particularly violent nature-culture opposition.

The final track, which on an LP would take up all of side 2, is the title track, an epic synth exploration that ends with a lovely, simple acoustic guitar figure. There is no jaw-dropping virtuosity here, just a commitment to telling long, subtle stories with sounds.

“We call that fire of the black thundercloud ‘electricity,’ and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?” - Thomas Carlyle